I am Founder and Principal at Bersin by Deloitte, leading provider of research-based membership programs in human resources (HR), talent and learning. Hundreds of the Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 use our proven people strategies to drive exceptional business results.

I've spent much of my career in technology, sales, marketing, and business leadership and I actively write about major global trends in leadership, management, HR and talent management technologies. I live in the San Francisco area, close enough to Silicon Valley to keep up with new technology and its impact on the business of talent.

Well first of all, it’s important to realize that Facebook does have a huge opportunity to make money in the recruiting space, with business models similar to LinkedIn. And today the company is selling plenty of recruitment advertising (we don’t know what percent of its ad revenue is from recruiting, but with nearly 1 billion users there’s plenty of opportunity).

Remember that the recruiting industry, which consists of over $130 billion spent on products and services to help employers find people, is all about “finding the right candidate.” And with so many people actively sharing all their personal information on Facebook, there are a lot of opportunities for companies (Facebook and others) to develop tools to help recruiters find those candidates (and vice versa).

The real business model in recruiting today is not candidates paying to put their resume online, but rather building fantastic search tools to help corporate recruiters find just the right people. We like to call this market “The Google of People” – and a variety of smart companies are working on this now. LinkedIn has built amazing tools in this market, and is now on a runrate to generate a billion dollars in talent management revenue next year.

That all said, going after this market takes intense focus (it’s a complex and highly competitive space), and it does not appear that Facebook is there yet.

The Social Jobs App (or “Partnership”)

The Facebook Social Jobs Application (or Partnership) today is an aggregated search tool that lets candidates search job postings among five of Facebook’s application partners (Monster, BranchOut, Work4Labs, US.jobs, and Jobvite). While this sounds like a good idea, it isn’t executed well.

Fig 1: Facebook Social Jobs App

When you use this application, you essentially type a search term into the box and select which of the five organizations you want to search from. And as you can see from the promotional page above, Facebook is promoting the total number of jobs in the system.

Well if you try the app (click here to try it out), you find it to be a fairly poorly implemented search system which doesn’t even come close to the services offered by LinkedIn or Indeed.com (Indeed is one of the most successful job aggregation systems in the market).

Today it has several challenges.

First, you have to select which job source you want to search (which more or less makes the system frustrating, since each of these five providers reaches different and overlapping parts of the market). So when you do search, it’s very confusing where to go.

Second, it doesnt really work very well. I did a few simple searches for “sales” jobs within ten miles of my house, and it identified a few interesting positions at Lithium, a local software company. But the job is in Miami and I live in California. So the search engine is not providing “deep linking” and may be less useful than going to these sources (or Indeed) alone.

Third, if you do find an interesting job, the app simply links you to the underlying tool for that particular partner, so you don’t get much help. I actually tried to “apply” to one of the jobs I found, and all it did was open up an email form with the “to” address filled in. (I won’t mention which of the partners gave me this result.) LinkedIn, by contrast, actually has a well engineered resume publishing system that lets you directly send your biographical information to a prospective employer.

Fourth, I think the whole system is just confusing. Why would I fill in the keywords and also select a category and subcategory? Why doesn’t it aggregate all the jobs together and let me sort them as a big group? And why, once the jobs appear, is there no way to sort or filter them?

Bottom line, I don’t think Facebook put a lot of energy into this “partnership.”

Today LinkedIn has more than 3,000 employees focused on building a highly integrated, compelling, value-oriented social network which meets the needs of business professionals and employers. Facebook has the opportunity to do something similar for its demographic, but the company is clearly not there. The “social jobs app” appears to be little more than a business partnership to promote some of Facebook’s partners, and perhaps a PR move to help Facebook appear to be assisting with the US unemployment rate.

The company still has a huge opportunity here, but may have to wait for its business partners to build out the search features, advertising tools, and data integration tools employers and candidates need. This means much of the revenue will go to these partners, and the Facebook recruiting experience will feel like the Android market: lots of tools which work differently, forcing employers and candidates to figure them out on their own.

You can follow Josh Bersin to stay up to date on trends, research, and news in all areas of HR, leadership, and talent management on twitter at @josh_bersin.

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